May 29, 2018

We are being ruined by getting what he want all of the time. That’s my theory and I have good reason for it. It’s not entirely bad news in that it shows that America is one of the most prosperous civilizations to ever exist. you want five billion different combinations of pizza? Go to the Pizza Hut website and make any combination of pizza you want from no pineapple to all pineapple. What you want you get at the click of a button.

This is at least part of what is making us into more and more individualized people at the cost of giving up our collective unity. If you need a lesbian movie channel, there’s one just for you on Netflix. My cable company just advertised for a Scientology channel. We watch volleyball on the BYU Mormon channel. I can turn on my device and the screen will deliver anything I want. What’s odd is that though Netflix offers me hundreds of movies, I still end up just watching Youtube videos. Our Google searches become more and more narrow, “How do I make a small koi pond?” was a recent search of mine. I got fifty how to videos delivered to my laptop. I gained years of experience from experts who make koi ponds and now I’m making a koi pond… though I’ve only put small aquariums together before.

Enter the SOLO movie. You don’t come to watch something the rest of the world loves, you come to bring your heightened, specialized, narrow tastes to watch a movie that you hope is catered to you. My Star Wars tastes have grown narrower after the prequels, because I don’t count them as Star Wars films. I count Force Awakens because I liked it, but I don’t count Last Jedi because I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the Aliens movies after Aliens 2, so they’re not canon. I liked all of the Marvel movies, so they’re all in.

Every franchise offering now begs us to weigh in since the internet has given all of us a voice. We comment on Trump vs. Hillary, quickly label who is in and out of our tribe and largely dismiss those who disagree with our tastes. And don’t get me started on the epic battle that is Thundercats Roar !

I heard so much negative about Solo that I almost didn’t want to see it. But I’m a huge Star Wars fan, making me an automatic Han Solo fan. I was hanging on the edge of my seat during the whole movie that was largely in an empty theater. This is a story, I’m convinced, would have captured a much bigger audience even a few years ago. I left thinking that movies aren’t what’s changing… we are. If everything isn’t perfect in something we watch, we’re encouraged to blow it up, because we want our way. We’re used to getting our way because we order our perfect little universe by blocking what we don’t like on our phones and even Facebook points adds and friends toward us if they agree with our tastes, probably because that’s what silicon valley thinks is how you’re supposed to socialize.

I would recommend Solo to any Star Wars fan, but these days I can’t be so bold. I don’t know your specific tastes you’ve been developing and I don’t know how flexible you are when things don’t go your way. One thing I fear about all of us having such specified tastes is that either what unites us will be so small that movies will no longer be profitable for the largest audience, or we will get lots of tiny, cheap movies which is pretty much what has happened to cable. If we want movies with budgets about the size of Iron Chef, then let’s keep doing this, because that’s where we’re heading.